FSFE Newsletter - January 2012

Preventing 6000 mines against Free Software?

Competition authorities are investigating the sale of 6000 patents from
Nortel, a bankrupt telecommunications equipment manufacturer, to a consortium
of Apple, Microsoft and four other companies.

FSFE considers it a serious risk to competition in the mobile technology
space, and Free Software as a whole, if those companies acquire these patents.
Soon after the sale, we approached EU and US competition authorities, and in
September submitted a summary of our concerns.

80 billion EUR for R&D: What will we get?

The European Commission has adopted a set of proposals for its next
framework program, called Horizon 2020. This program will provide 80 billion
EUR for research and development projects from 2014 to 2020. Prior to
finalisation of the proposal, FSFE had
provided input to the Commission in order to make the program accessible
for Free Software research and projects. FSFE will continue to engage with the
European institutions in order to support the development of Horizon 2020 in
the interest of Europe's citizens.

Those are nice examples where politicians understand the advantages of Free
Software and also act upon this knowledge. We want more politicians with this
knowledge. One concrete activity is our "ask your
candidates campaign", where we send out
questions to the political parties before elections, and then evaluate the
answers. This year we did so for elections in Vienna/Austria, Switzerland, and
5 federal state elections in Germany.

Something completely different

In the dispute between the companies AVM and Cybits the written reasoning
of the decision of the Regional Court of Berlin is now available. The court
confirmed FSFE's view that users of GNU GPLed software are allowed to modify
and install it even if it is shipped as a part of an embedded device's
firmware.

In this
month Fellowship interview Chris talked with Paul Boddie, who has been
working with Python since 1995, and from 2006 to 2010 was involved in
organising the annual EuroPython conference, administering various
conference-related tools and developing the conference website.

An important decision of the Court of Justice of EU, AG's opinion in
awaited European interoperability ruling, two software patent cases and much
more is to be found in our legal
news.

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